1. Field of the Invention
This present invention relates generally to privilege association within a multiple organization context and more specifically to managing a virtual persona through selective association with an organization from a plurality of organizations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Over the last few years many enterprises have deployed business to business (B2B) e-commerce solutions. The major difference between B2B and business to consumer (B2C) solutions is that in a B2C solution a customer typically shops on behalf of himself, whereas in a B2B solution the customer probably does not represent a person who is buying for himself. Instead, the common B2B scenario is where a person buys on behalf of an organization. Increasingly this person may buy on behalf of more than one division of an organization or even more than one company. When such a buyer, who represents multiple divisions or organizations, is purchasing from a single seller there is a need to distinguish his or her privileges and attributes per buyer organization he represents. As an example, if Bob is a buyer for both ACME and EMCA organizations then the shipping addresses he is entitled to use when he buys for ACME will be different from that of EMCA. Additionally, contractual entitlements with the seller will be different with respect to the buyer organization he represents.
The typical solution to this issue, where there are multiple buyer organizations, some of which may be represented by a single person, is to have the person register a separate identity for each buyer instance they represent. This technique does solve the problem, but it has a number of drawbacks including:                The buyer typically will have to maintain multiple identities on the system with different user logon Ids and passwords.        Whenever the buyer needs to update their personal profile information they will have to remember to manually update all other identities to synchronize the identities they maintain on the system.        When a site administrator gives a buyer a certain personal privilege the administrator will have to determine all the identities the buyer has on the system and assign this privilege to each one of the buyer identities.        Having the person represented as a separate identity for each buyer organization typically represents is a drain on the system resources due to replication.        
As the number of buyer organizations represented by a single buyer increases the deficiencies listed previously typically becomes increasingly unmanageable. For example using the diagram of FIG. 2, there is depicted a typical current multiple organization situation as may be found in a commerce environment. While a commerce environment is used in the example, the example is not meant to be restricted to such environments as the principles apply to similar situations and environments. The apex of multiple organization commerce system 200 is root organization 205. Associated with root organization 205 are three buyer organizations. Buyer A 225 organization has associated Buyer A users 245 and entitlement account A 250. The entitlement account provides a representation or instance of the customer/buyer. From a seller perspective, a seller does not deal with buyer organizations, but rather with accounts. The typical industry standard practice is to map an account to an organization. In this way, when a buyer user becomes associated with an organization within their session, they become entitled to shop on behalf of that organization's account, and also accounts of any child organizations. Similarly Buyer B 220 has associated Buyer B users 240 and entitlement account B 255, while Buyer C 215 organization has associated Buyer C users 235 and entitlement account C 260. For a single seller 210 having store 270, it would be necessary to create a distinct buyer identity under each of the buyer organizations in order to be able to shop on behalf of all three buyers as shown by the doffed arrow of Registered Customer role 280.
It would therefore be highly desirable to have a means for allowing a more efficient way to generally provide user support across multiple accounts.